Trophic Interactions
- Plant-herbivore-predator-detritivore multi-trophic interactions: How
do above-ground grazing food webs and below-ground detritus food webs
interact and feed back to each other?
- Mechanisms underlying the diet compositions of consumers: What are
the roles of resource availability, resource attractiveness and
preference, energy and nutritional requirement, foraging behavior and
hunting mode, immediate and potential predation risk, and developmental
stage in determining dietary patterns of consumers?
- Plant-herbivore arms race: Can morphological, physiological,
physical, and chemical trait matching between plants and herbivores
predict the degree of herbivory?
- Ecology of various types of plant defense mechanisms against
herbivores: What biotic and abiotic factors determine the relative
importance of physical vs. chemical, direct vs. indirect, and induced
vs. constitutive plant defense?
- The role of consumptive vs. non-consumptive predator effects on
predator-prey interactions: What are the relative strengths of density-,
physiology-, and behavior-mediated trophic interactions in governing
predator-prey population dynamics?
- Multiple drivers of direct and indirect non-consumptive predator
effects and landscape of fear: How can we integrate resource landscape,
thermal landscape, evasion landscape, and encounter landscape to predict
non-consumptive predator-prey interactions?
- Plant-herbivore-predator tri-trophic triangles: How can we shift
from the traditional chain-perspective of plant-herbivore-predator
tri-trophic interactions to the modern network-perspective of
tri-trophic triangles?
- Intraguild predation, omnivory, and cannibalism of organisms: What
are the patterns of intraguild predation, omnivory, and cannibalism in
different types of ecosystems and their impacts on food web
dynamics?